The invention generally relates to failure recovery systems and, more particularly, to a system and method that can detect and respond to system failures during system start-up and which can also select between multiple system memories to use during start-up operations.
To guard against failures that occur during operation, a computer system may employ Automatic System Recovery (ASR) technology. ASR technology is designed to protect a computer system from critical errors, such as component or memory failures, during normal operations. A computer system employing ASR technology begins operation (on power-up or reboot) by initially executing trusted instructions from a first portion of the system's read-only memory (ROM). A second portion of ROM is then loaded into the system's random access memory (RAM) and executed to complete the initial start-up operation. On completion of the start-up process the computer system's operating system is loaded and ASR is enabled.